Electric Alerion Express 33, geek green
How about three cheers for Vincent Argiro, and guys like him willing to enthusiastically test the bleeding edge of marine technology. That’s his first boat above, an Alerion Express 33, which is also the...
Panbo News and Reviews
Rogue Wave WiFi, the Bullet rules
Here’s a beautiful sight, and I don’t mean my float mate’s headsail furl. Those six LEDs on the Rogue Wave WiFi transceiver are showing (from the bottom up) that it’s getting power (via the Ethernet cable), that it’s made a connection with a down below computer (or router), and finally that its connection with an onshore hotspot is good enough to light up all four signal strength indicators. And I can attest that if the hotspot itself has a good Internet connection, this high power WiFi radio is ready to rock. I’ve been pretty pleased this season with the performance of the Wave Comet I wrote about last March — it far outperforms the WiFi built into my PCs or phones — but the Rogue leaves the Comet in the dust…
Navionics Mobile, UGC & Plotter Sync
Big, big news in the world of user generated content (or UGC, or crowd sourcing, or whatever we decide to call it): Navionics Mobile 5, rolling out around the world as I write, supports UGC, big time, and it’s central to the company’s “Navionics Anytime, Anywhere” vision of the future. Those screen shots above — which show the new “Community Layer” turned on and off — are from a beta of US East 5.0 running on the Panbo test iPhone, but most all of that UGC work was done by Navionics founder and chief visionary Giuseppe Carnevali when he cruised up here in early September. It would be hard to overstate Giuseppe’s enthusiasm about enabling interested Navionics users to share data of all sorts, some of which can be validated and added to the company’s regular chart database for the benefit of all users…
Coastal Explorer Express & 2011; hello subscription model
Rose Point Navigation showed off numerous new products and features during the NMEA Conference, as mentioned on Tuesday, but it make take a while for me, or anyone, to sort them all out. This is especially true as the company has both a “relaxed” marketing style and a tendency to put product perfection over actual shipping dates. For instance, a week after issuing a stack of press releases, there’s not yet a peep about them on Rose Point’s home page, but instead a link to a “sneak peak” (sic) at Coastal Explorer 2010, a product that will never actually be released! What is new on the site is info about the heavily stripped down new version of CE called CE Express, which was announced last February in Miami but in fact is the first CE 2011-style software to ship. Except that the Google Earth-like chart zoom slider seen above in the copy of Express I downloaded last week has already been replaced in the ongoing CE 2010 beta…
iThing boating, Rose Point’s in, Maretron too
I’ve been using an iPad for a week now and — sorry, Steve — I’m not yet feeling “the magic”. But just the fact that I can envision so many improvements to something already so cool speaks to how amazingly fast this wireless, touch screen, app device phenomenon is moving. My iPhone and iPod Touch have been almost magically transformed by iOS 4 (coming soon to the pad) and my Android phone is such a hotbed of fertile app chaos that it sometimes gets hot quite literally. And almost everything that’s useful and fun about these devices is doubly so on my boat, with loads of room to grow…
DY AISnet, making a good thing easy
Another show, another nifty AIS appliance from Digital Yacht. Following the introduction of the iThing-friendly iAIS receiver in Southampton, DY showed up at NMEA with the AISnet receiver above. It’s a pretty obvious concept, but I don’t think it’s been done before, and it could encourage a nice proliferation of land-based AIS stations flowing target data onto the web…
Simrad BSM-2, Broadband Broadband sonar
Just about the time that Navico introduced Broadband Sonar, Airmar began rolling out a series of Broadband transducers claimed to enable dramatic advancements in fishfinder performance. Which was confusing, especially as no manufacturer offered a fishfinder able to take full advantage of their abilities. Well, darned if Navico isn’t the first to at least announce such a sonar. Meet the Simrad BSM-2 “broad band” Broadband fishfinder…
NMEA Technology Award, yike!
I don’t recall why I had my hand up like that, but do remember the scene — Furuno showing off NavNet on some sort of military grade head’s up display, I think — as one of many geek moments I’ve enjoyed at NMEA conferences. In my experience, there’s no concentration of marine electronics expertise and enthusiasm anywhere that compares to the Conference’s trade-only exhibition hall. But the affair became a dite more stressful for me last year when I got involved in the NMEA Technology Award, which went to Navico’s Broadband Radar with honorable mentions to Maretron’s N2KBuilder and Navionics’ Mobile (PDF here). This year may be even harder…
Geonav, the giant roll out
Geonav has been talking about a Fall U.S. roll out for some time, but now it’s turning out they have a lot more to show than the G12 and G10 MFDs introduced in Europe last year. Seen in the photo above is an even newer model called the GIS10, and while it and the 12-inch model include most all the features seen online for the G series, they also support NMEA 2000, Gigabit Ethernet, and, yes, the Side Imaging technology pioneered by sister company Humminbird. And how about those sexy MID 110 multifunction instrument displays (and the matching autopilot head)?
RAPC Nautilus, toughest marine PC yet?
This is my favorite sort of show and tell. The guy doing the showing, Bob Hilliard, is the chief engineer involved, and the location was the nav station of the 105-foot ketch Apache, which will be a beta site for Bob’s creation, the RAPC Nautilus marine PC on the chart table. I admit to being a bit dazzled by the boat, which you can gander in this old charter listing, and the Pinot Noir, but I’m thinking that’s the most bullet-proof boat computer I’ve ever seen…
